Calculating Your Chances in the Lottery

April 5, 2025

For Those Moving to the Lottery: Calculating Your Chances

Update 4-9-25: This blog does not yet reflect the subsequent (i) approvals by OCM of social equity applicants who fixed their applications this spring, and (ii) the Ramsey County judge's order on April 4 that OCM should hold the delayed SEA lottery now. Sign up for the newsletter to get updated information sent to your inbox, once available!

-- MN-OCM released the below updated application numbers in late March. They reflect the number of applications submitted by the March deadline and also update the numbers from the 2024 round.

From OCM, https://mn.gov/ocm/businesses/licensing/process.jsp

Jen's takeaways:

• There were 1,322 new microlicense applications submitted this spring. As an uncapped license type, the micro was attractive to a lot of people, as expected.
  

• The first micros to be allowed to move to opening are in that first column, the preapproved social equity applicants. There are still 527 of them, after many applicants took the opportunity to get a refund in January and other withdrawals. My understanding is that many, if not all 527 of them, have gotten the email to proceed to the next step (background check).

Looking at the capped categories which will go to a May/June lottery:

• The fact that one-half of the capped categories are reserved for social equity applicants (SEA) will work to the benefit of the SEAs in the May/June lottery. In addition, there were only 20 additional social equity applicants in the mezzo category this spring, and a number of withdrawals from the fall round, making it a rosier picture than many expected. I’ve calculated the likelihood of an applicant in being chosen below, taking into account that OCM has said they will run the lottery in 2 rounds: one with the SEA applicants only, and the second with all unpicked SEA applicants plus the non-SEA applicants.

• In fact, a mezzolicense application with social equity qualification now has a 38% chance of being chosen in the May/June lottery!

Here’s the rest of the probability I derived:

For those who like math, here’s how I got these numbers: The chances of a SEA mezzo applicant receiving one of the 50 licenses reserved for SEA-Mezzo are now 50/(209+20), or 20%. But remember that OCM will then add all of the SEA-Mezzo applicants who did not get picked in that lottery to the regular lottery round, so each Mezzo applicant then has a 22% chance: 50/(229-50 SEAs who got picked already) + 44 non-SEA mezzo applicants = 223)). For the SEAs, the probability of winning on the first try or second try then are combined using a weighted average in statistical analysis (thanks, Bob Walloch!). (Catch an error? Think I’m wrong? Let me know: hello@northstarcannabisconsulting.com)